I thought the word and the definition sounded beautiful, but then I also learned that it was coined in 2017 and has been accused of imposing outside culture. Namely, here is a criticism I found on Twitter and Reddit but without further attribution or detail:
Just wanted to share and see what the community thought about it.
I find it hard to blame people for bad use of characters that they don’t have on their keyboard layouts. I’m French speaking, I don’t care if you’re not putting an accent on “échelle” when writing to me in a casual conversation, I understand you mean “ladder” when you write “echelle”.
In Scandinavian languages, åäöæø are not even accents. They’re completely separate letters. And substitutions can lead to entirely different words. It still used to be common to see ao used instead when a lot of systems had problems with anything other than 7bit ASCII. (Mostly Microsoft, of course.)
On the other hand there were things like TV shows where names might be transliterated, so Pääkkönen might become paeaekkoenen which is text gore, but might have some chance of getting pronounced remotely right.
Oh and the generally “funny” feature especially in dumb phones where the so called Microsoft alphabetical order would put ä first in a list instead of nearly last.
I understand, but I also don’t have å or ø in my language, so my mental mapping is gonna be “a” and “o”.
Lol thanks for letting us know we will change the language for you
That was not the point, and I don’t know how you got there.
It seems like a poor latinization system to use the same characters used for accented letters to represent those different letters
Blame some monks from the dark ages
Thank you, I appreciate this as someone who speaks two languages of which neither has accents.
This is probably not relevant, but if you use Gboard on your Android device, you can long press for accents e.g. Pokémon
Actually relevant. As long as you know the accents exist at all in those words. For me it’s hard to remember them, especially in foreign languages I don’t speak, I kind of remember the “phonetic” version in my language, if it makes sense. Sometimes we have common accents that do different things to letters or words. Other times it’s just like nothing I’ve ever seen, so I have no idea how it’s pronounced or what it is.
So many times I wanted to talk about ‘el año’, and instead wrote ‘el ano’. 😣
(Spanish. ‘the year’ vs ‘the anus’)
This happened to me for years until I finally found a trick that works for me, which is that anos sounds more similar to anus than años.
Even English has a handful of words with accents. “Naïve” comes to mind. Of course, most people ignore those accents.
IIRC the diaeresis is actually optional and “naive” is actually okay too. Technically even “cooperative” initially took one on the second O.
It’s all optional now, really. People also don’t use æroplane as a spelling anymore either.
Fun fact, the “Académie française” (French language authority) dropped a bunch of accents with their “nouvelle grammaire”. A notable example are words with a circumflex accent on the O, like “hôpital” or “hôpital”. The accent was present to replace the “os” in the old spellings (hospital/hostel, the S was carried over from Latin), didn’t change the pronunciation in any way.
I’m German myself but since I am a programmer I like the US-Keyboard more than the German one. The easy fix for me was using US-intl-nodeadkeys so I can use the right alt key to type those stupid German umlauts. This should work at least for most (Western-)European languages.
I got tired of switching keyboards so I learned the slt codes for common accents. Saves time and there are only really a handful of common ones that you need for the average message